Fake FTDI Chip in Tevo Tornado

Hi everyone!

I recently received my Tevo Tornado. Assembly was easy and the first prints came out nicely.

But when I attached an Raspberry Pi 3 and connected Octoprint to the Tornado, the USB connection got lost repeatedly after about 1 minute.
I tested 4 different USB cables, compiled a new firmware with a lower baudrate (115200 instead of 250000), but nothing helped.
dmesg showed one error message saying "usb_serial_generic_read_bulk_callback: -urbstopped -32" per disconnect.

Then I tested the connection with Cura3 on a Windows machine. Here the connection worked without hangups. I guess the windows driver is more tolerant than the linux one....

This was when I remembered the fake FTDI chips that were in the news a few month ago. I checked the serial number, and indeed, it is one of the counterfeit chips.

Today I completely disassembled the Tevo control box, took out the control board and desoldered the bad FT232RL. The genuine replacement now works flawlessly

While I'm at it, I will also fix the horrible wiring and build a custom frame under the printer from aluminium extrusion.

Hope this helps if someone has the same problems with the serial connection under linux

Quote
kwerner

Fake FTDI chips that were in the news a few month ago. I checked the serial number, and indeed, it is one of the counterfeit chips.

Where do I get to the information about the Fake FT232RL chips.

Thank You

This thread has some images that show differences in the chip markings: [www.eevblog.com]

And this site explains how to check the serial number: [www.starlino.com]

The chip I got had exactly that "A50285BI" serial.